Description

It all began when Paul Chain split with Death SS to form his own band. Owing to a combination of managerial differences between Paul and Steve Sylvester, the other main man behind Death SS, and the immense amount of musical ideas swirling around inside Paul Chain's head, the split was inevitable. His first solo offering was this, ‘Detaching From Satan’ from 1984. Many newcomers may feel a bit overwhelmed at the size of Paul Chain’s discography, so right away I’m going to recommend starting here. This EP can really sum up Paul Chain’s sound, and contains some of his best material. The music here sounds very 70’s influenced, not unlike other doom acts at the time such as Pentagram, Witchfinder General, etc. However, this definitely has much more of a psychedelic edge to it (as one can see expand more at times in Paul Chain’s discography), and there are interludes containing chants and keyboards for eerie effect. The vocals are especially stunning, and aren’t the nasal Ozzy Osbourne-esque style that a lot of others were influenced by. Paul Chain’s voice is very elegant yet powerful, and carries much of the melody in the song. The vocals are carrying the melody, there aren’t really lyrics here, it’s just phonetics. Paul Chain can get away with this because his voice just does that much for the song. It’s pretty apparent that the songs here are pretty simple in terms of structure. But this works very well for Paul Chain Violet Theater, as each song has it’s own voice due to the few riffs involved interacting with each other very well. In other words, although these songs are simple, they’re just well arranged. In addition to this, the guitar solos are astounding, and create a nice juxtaposition with the singing in terms of where the melody is in each song. All in all a fantastic blend of 70’s psychedelic rock, heavy metal, and doom metal, ‘Detaching From Satan’ will convince you in a mere 23 minutes that you have to hear more of this. 2010 cd-reissue with 2 bonus tracks Track listing: 1. Occultism 2. Voyage to Hell 3. Armageddon 4. 17 Day 5. Pentagon Society-1984 studio track 6. Vivid Eyes in the Dark-1984 studio track